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First of all, I'd like to thank Sherri and her colleagues in the disability community
for organizing this. I've been involved with a number of similar kinds of panels, sitting
on that side of the room and I must say it's a much more comfortable place to be over there.
(laughter)
I guess that if you do that often enough you have to expect to pay the piper at the end
of day. So here I am paying the piper I hope you'll bear with me as I try. In terms of
the CRPD and the Nova Scotia government, the NDP government here I have to say to you,
you know, as was said in my introductory remarks, I've made a life of working on the CRPD here
in Nova Scotia, across Canada, and around the world for 15 years. Right back from the
early days of developing it and all through the negotiation process and then, as Kelly
mentioned, we moved into ratification of that. We worked to get the government of Canada
to ratify the convention and that happened in part because of provinces like Nova Scotia
stepping up and saying they were supportive of that happening.
In any case, as I say, the CRPD is what I've been doing for a long time and I've travelled
around the world to try to get governments to implement the convention once it's been
ratified and it's been interesting for me as a citizen of the province of Nova Scotia
in the last three or four years, because I've found that an awful lot of the stuff I've
been advocating for in other provinces and other countries ... am I too loud? ... Popping?
... It's part of paying the piper too. (laughter)
I've found in other countries and in other jurisdictions I've been trying to get governments
to move forward on the CRPD. It's been interesting to me because here in Nova Scotia the government
has proven itself to be quite responsive over the last three or four years, we've worked
on a number of specific pieces to move the convention forward and the articles of the
convention, so I think I can say with surety that the NDP will continue to do that. We've
certainly seen a lot of commitment on the part of the government over the last three
or four years to move forward on different aspects of the convention. Those of you who
know it, know it's a very comprehensive document, it talks about the full range of human rights
and one of the challenges of any jurisdiction is to determine where to start, where to start
moving on the convention and so on. And I think that what we've seen here in Nova Scotia
is they identified issues around housing and deinstitutionalization as a place they needed
to start and there's been a lot of work happen around that over the last couple of years
so I think if we point to the example of what we've seen before and to say that it sets
a good base for us to move forward.
I have negative three minutes (laughter) to wrap up here so perhaps I should speak backwards.
(laughter) I just want to start out by saying thank you very much to Sherri and all the
other folks who organized this. It's become a sort of a tradition in the disability community
in Halifax when there's an election, a federal election, a provincial election, a municipal
election, our community gathers in this room and we grill the people who are running for
office and I think that it's a tremendously important tradition, something that we need
to continue. We need as people with disabilities, to make our voices heard in our community
and so on, so I want to thank you for the opportunity to participate in this. It's been
an extremely interesting experience for me. I want to say a final word of closing that
I'm very proud to be sitting here as a representative of the NDP tonight and I look at what the
NDP has done over the last four years around disability in this province and as I said
at the beginning of the evening I got involved with it and I decided to run for the nomination
because I've seen some of the fantastic things that have been happening. We've just started
down that road and we need to continue that work so I hope that you'll continue to support
us and to support our work as we move forward to implement the convention and to make the
lives of people with disabilities here in the province equal, as they should be. Thanks
very much. (applause)